MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” systems. In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the “Living Liberia Fabric,” an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, “Generative Visual Renku,” an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects. Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Erin Reilly is Research Director for Project New Media Literacies, a past CMS project now housed at the University of Southern California. Karen Schrier, a CMS grad, is the Director of Interactive Media and Technology at ESI Design and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning. Sangita Shresthova is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer, who currently manages Henry Jenkins new project on participatory culture and civic engagement at USC. Pilar Lacasa is a researcher at Alcalá University in Spain. She also works on a project for Electronic Arts in Spain about how to use commercial games in education. Mitch Resnick is Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory. He develops new technologies that engage children in creative learning experiences and is a principal investigator with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a CMS-partnered project.

Aswin Punathambekar is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He teaches and writes about media globalization, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Xiaochang Li lives in New York, where she consults as something of a media and branding mercenary, specializing in the intersection of globalization, digital media, and rampant delight. Ana Domb recently graduated from CMS and is currently working on user experience research at The Meme, a design consultancy firm based out of Cambridge. Orit Kuritsky–a scriptwriter, content editor, and creative director–is also a graduate of the CMS master’s program. Jing Wang is a professor in Chinese Cultural Studies and the Director of New Media Action Lab. She is a CMS-affiliated faculty currently working on a project (NGO2.0) that brings together social media and nonprofit organizations in China.

Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory. Philip Tan is a CMS grad who now directs the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a partnership between MIT/CMS and the government of Singapore to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium. Ivan Askwith is a CMS grad working in New York City as Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency. Clara Fernandez-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a graduate of the CMS master’s program.

Pete Donaldson is a Professor in the MIT Literature section, which he headed from 1990 until 2005. Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program and directs the HyperStudio, a CMS research project. Scot Osterweil leads several Education Arcade projects promoting learning in math, literacy, history, science and foreign language. Rekha Murthy, CMS ’05, works at the intersection of public radio and digital media, currently overseeing distribution and content strategy initiatives for PRX, an online distributor of audio programs to public radio networks, stations, and audio platforms including mobile, internet, and satellite radio. Matthew Weise, CMS ’04, is Lead Game Designer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

CMS director William Uricchio discusses the history of the program, some of the challenges it has faced, as well as the unique role it has assumed at MIT and within higher education when it comes to a new vision of the humanities.

Deborah Fitzgerald, Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, opens the CMS 10th Anniversary symposium with her remarks on the role of CMS at MIT and the essence of applied humanities education within the MIT mission.

Henry Jenkins’ 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.

This global call-in show, hosted by MIT Center for Future Civic Media fellow Ethan Zuckerman, featured a number of journalists, advocates and programmers who utilize new technologies to gather information in contentious geographic regions: Cameran Ashraf, Iran Mehdi Yahyanejad, Iran Georgia Popplewell, Haiti Huma Yusuf, Pakistan Ruthie Ackerman, Liberia Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, Zimbabwe Lova Rakotomalala, Madagascar Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today’s forum. The concept of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” — formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark — offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance. MIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis join Thomas Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.